York Historic Environment Record

The York Minster Heritage Quad development took place between August 2023 and November 2024, with final groundworks concluding in March 2025. As required by the Scheduled Monument Consent and planning conditions, a watching brief on all excavations was undertaken, monitoring extensive ground reduction and excavations for new services, foundations and landscaping. The overall watching briefs of the excavations for the buildings and their services confirmed the desktop study and earlier trial trenching. It showed that there had been a series of tipping and spreading of demolition and domestic rubbish across the area with a consequent rise in ground level. That, together with the area having long been gardens, led to poor ground bearing qualities in the soil. Observation of the construction techniques used in various brick garden walls and the walls of buildings indicates that at one time there was a concerted campaign of introducing new garden wall boundaries that largely remained intact at the commencement of the build. Some, like the garden wall alongside the bottom of the city wall banking, had already been largely demolished in the 1990s but others remained in situ. Here it might also be noted that the main part of the deanery back garden is substantially lower in height than the area of the building site showing that it has not been tipped over and built up in the same manner. The structure, most likely a stable, discovered in the deanery courtyard, had similar construction techniques to the garden walls and a wall of the old deanery and points to the 1829-30 construction of the new Neo-Gothic deanery as the time when the formal garden walls and the stables were constructed. This period saw the destruction of the large prebendal mansion of Stillington that is shown in various topographic images, usually in the background of views of the archbishop’s 13th century chapel. It stood just south east of the chapel (since 1806 the Old Palace library). That and the later 1938 phase of demolition of the 19th century deanery and its ancillary buildings like the stable block are likely to have provided some of the debris and raising of the garden levels across the whole site. The site was also provided with some deep culverted garden land drains built of brick and standing up to five courses in height, with a brick laid base and side walls capped by transversely-set bricks: several of this type of drain were observed on the site.